Organize Your Team with Web-Based Collaboration and Project Management

Keeping your team connected is tricky, no matter if they're working from home, across the continent, or even in adjacent cubicles. We're always on the lookout for effective and inexpensive collaboration tools, and this week we have one that is both.

It's a fairly full-featured project management tool. You can maintain multiple projects, each with their own milestones and tasks. Milestones can have any number of subtasks, as well as tags, which make them easier to search, and everything can have a status message, so the team can see at a glace how a project is progressing. One of my favorite features: Anyone can assign (or unassign) themselves to a task just by clicking the star next to the item.

Individuals also have space to enter a Twitter-like status report. For more direct communication, Binfire lets team members chat via instant messaging and e-mail. There's also a SharePoint-like file folder, with configurable permissions on a per-project basis. And a whiteboard module lets multiple people chat and draw to share ideas without leaving Binfire.

All this happens in a Web browser -- there's no need to install any software. Unfortunately, though, I had some wonky experiences in Internet Explorer 9 (though Firefox worked fine). And there's no mobile apps available -- at least not yet.